The Earliest Days of the Electric Guitar

The
Rickenbacker International Corporation (RIC) grew out of the first
company founded for the sole purpose of creating and manufacturing fully
electric musical instruments and amplifiers-the Los Angeles-based
Electro String Instrument Corporation. Founded in 1931 by Adolph
Rickenbacker and George D. Beauchamp, this pioneering firm produced
"Rickenbacker Electro Instruments", the first modern electric
guitars. RIC's history now spans 87 years in business
on the leading edge of
music trends that have changed popular culture forever. Played by
Hawaiian musicians of the 1930s to jazz bassists of the 1990s, by the
Beatles and Byrds to the most-current rock groups on MTV, the ringing
sound of Rickenbacker instruments has helped define music as we know it.
Never resting on its laurels, RIC continues to ignite and propel the
electric guitar's transformation of music by providing today's musicians
with the finest instruments available.

It
all began in 1920s Los Angeles, a city fast becoming the entertainment
capital of the world. Like many of his contemporaries, steel player
George Beauchamp (pronounced Beechum) sought a louder, improved guitar.
Several inventors had already tried to build louder stringed instruments
by adding megaphone-like amplifying horns to them. Beauchamp saw one of
these and went looking for someone to build him one, too. His search led
to John Dopyera, a violin repairman with a shop fairly close to
Beauchamp's L.A. home.

Dopyera and his brother Rudy's first attempt for George sat on a
stand; a Victrola horn attached to the bottom and pointed towards the
audience. It was a failure, so the Dopyeras then started experiments
with thin, cone-like aluminum resonators attached to a guitar bridge and
placed inside a metal body. A successful prototype (soon dubbed
"the tri-cone") used three of these resonators. Beauchamp, so
pleased with the results, suggested forming a manufacturing company with
the Dopyeras, who had already started making more guitars in their shop.
Setting out to find investors, he took the tri-cone prototype and the
Sol Hoopii Trio (a world-famous Hawaiian group) to a lavish party held
by his millionaire cousin-in-law, Ted Kleinmeyer. He was so excited
about the guitar and the prospects for a new company that he gave
Beauchamp a check for $12,000 that night.

Substantial
production of the metal-body guitars began almost immediately.
Beauchamp, acting as general manager, hired some of the most experienced
and competent craftsmen available, including several members of his own
family and the Dopyeras. He purchased equipment and located the new
factory near Adolph Rickenbacker's tool and die shop. Rickenbacker
(known to his friends as Rick) was a highly skilled production engineer
with experience in a wide variety of manufacturing techniques.
Swiss-born, he was also a relative of WWI flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker.
Well equipped to manufacture metal bodies for the Nationals, Adolph
owned one of the largest deep-drawing presses on the West Coast and soon
carried the title of engineer in the National Company.

Unfortunately, the seeds for an internal dispute within National
were planted in the very beginning. By late 1928 the Dopyeras became
very disgruntled with the management of company and resources. John
Dopyera, who rightfully considered himself an inventor, ironically
thought that Beauchamp wasted time experimenting with new ideas. Dopyera
and Beauchamp lived in two different worlds and apparently were at odds
on every level of personal, business and social interaction. That they
could not work together successfully was a foregone conclusion. Another
problem was Ted Kleinmeyer, who had inherited a million dollars at 21
and was trying to spend it all before turning 30 (when he would inherit
another million). A Roaring '20s party animal, successful losing money
faster than he could make it, he started hounding Beauchamp for cash
advances from National's till. George's fault was that he could not turn
people down, especially his friends and the company's president.

John Dopyera quit and formed the Dobro Corporation, but
maintained National stock. The Dopyera brothers would eventually win
more in a court settlement. Then Ted Kleinmeyer, nearly broke (and a few
years away from the rest of his inheritance), sold his controlling
interest in the concern to another Dopyera, brother Louis. In a shakeup
that followed, Beauchamp and several other employees were fired. Now
George needed a new project and a new company, fast.

Along with others of his day, he had thought about the
possibility of an electric guitar for several years and, though not
schooled in electronics, had started experimenting as early as 1925 with
PA systems and microphones. Early on he made a single-string test guitar
out of a 2x4 board and a pickup from a Brunswick electric phonograph.
This experiment shaped his thinking and put him on the right path. After
leaving National, he began his home experiments in earnest and attended
night-school classes in electronics.

By
1930 many people familiar with electricity knew that a metal moving
through a magnetic field caused a disturbance that in turn could be
translated into an electric current by a nearby coil of wire. Electrical
generators and phonograph pickups utilized different applications of
this principle. The problem building a guitar pickup was creating a
practical way of translating the strings' vibration directly into a
current. After many months of trial and error, George developed a pickup
that consisted of two horseshoe magnets. The strings passed through
these and over a coil, which had six pole pieces concentrating the
magnetic field under each string. (Conducting work on his dining room
table, he used the motor out of the family washing machine to wind the
coil. Paul Barth, who helped Beauchamp, said that they eventually used a
sewing machine motor.)

When
the pickup seemed to be doing its job, Beauchamp called on Harry Watson,
a skilled craftsman who had been National's factory superintendent, to
make a wooden neck and body for it. In several hours, carving with small
hand tools, a rasp, and a file, the first fully electric guitar took
form. It was nicknamed the "Frying Pan," for obvious reasons.
Anxious to manufacture it, Beauchamp enlisted his friend Adolph
Rickenbacker. With Adolph's help, know-how, ideas, and capital were
abundant. The first name of the company was Ro-Pat-In Corporation but
was soon changed to Electro String. Adolph became president and George
secretary-treasurer. They called the instruments Rickenbackers because
it was a famous name (thanks to cousin Eddie) and easier than Beauchamp
to pronounce. Paul Barth and Billy Lane, who helped with an early
preamplifier design, both had small financial interests in the company
as production began in a small rented shop at 6071 S. Western Ave., next
to Rickenbacker's tool and die plant. (Rick's other company still made
metal parts for National and Dobro guitars and Bakelite plastic products
such as Klee-B-Tween toothbrushes, fountain pens, and candle holders.)

Electro
String had several obstacles. Timing could not have been worse--1931
heralded the lowest depths of the Great Depression and few people had
money to spend on guitars. Musicians resisted at first; they had no
experience with electrics and only the most farsighted saw their
potential. The Patent Office did not know if the Frying Pan was an
electrical device or a musical instrument. What's more, no patent
category included both. Many competing companies rushed to get an
electric guitar onto the market, too. By 1935 it seemed futile to
maintain a legal battle against all of these potential patent
infringements.

Hawaiian
guitars (lap steels) would be the best known and most accepted 1930s
Rickenbackers. Early literature illustrates both 6- and 7-string
versions of the Frying Pan. Both had the same cast aluminum
construction, compared with the prototype's wood. Over the years (this
guitar would be available into the 1950s) two scale lengths would be
offered: 22 1/2 inch and 25 inch. Workers stuffed the bodies and necks
with newspapers, which today can provide a clue as to the guitar's date
of manufacture. Soon after the Frying Pan, several additional steel
models were offered, the most popular being the hard-plastic Bakelite
Model B, later named Model BD. The earliest examples had a volume
control and five decorative chrome cover plates on top. By the late 1930s
they had both tone and volume controls and white-enameled metal cover plates. In the 1970s, David Lindley used a Bakelite steel on many
recordings with Jackson Browne, proving the integrity of the original
design in a modern context. Many players consider these lap steels the
finest ever produced.

Electro
String's first Spanish (standard) guitar had a flattop hollow body with
small F-holes and a slotted-peghead. A bound neck joined at the 14th
fret. By the mid-1930s, the concert-sized Ken Roberts Model (named after
one of Beauchamp's guitar-playing friends) came out. It had a bound neck
that joined the body at the 17th fret, a shaded 2-tone brown top with
F-holes, and a Kauffman vibrato tailpiece. In the 1930s and 1940s there
were at least two electric arch top models. The SP had a maple body,
shaded spruce top, bound rosewood neck with large position markers, and
a built-in horseshoe pickup. The Model S-59 sported a blonde finish and
a narrow, detachable horseshoe pickup. This so-called "Rickenbacker
Electro peerless adjustable pickup unit" was also available as a
separate accessory and would attach to most F-hole style arch tops.

Despite
the popularity of arch tops, the 1935 Bakelite Model B Spanish guitar
made the most history for Rickenbacker. Though not entirely solid (it
had thick plastic walls and a detachable Spanish neck), it achieved the
desired result-virtual elimination of the acoustic feedback that plagued
big-box electrics of the day. It set the stage for all solid body guitars
to follow, even though it was difficult to play sitting down on the
bandstand. (A Bakelite Spanish the size most guitarists were accustomed
to would have been as heavy, literally, as a sack of bowling balls.) A
variation of the Bakelite Spanish invented by Doc Kauffman (who would
later become Leo Fender's first partner) was the Vibrola Spanish Guitar,
an ungainly thing equipped with a motorized vibrato tailpiece. So heavy,
it required a stand to hold it up.

From
the very beginning Electro String developed and sold amplifiers. After
all, the instruments worked only in conjunction with them. The first
production-model amp was designed and built by a Mr. Van Nest at his
L.A. radio shop. Shortly thereafter, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker hired
design engineer Ralph Robertson to work on amplifiers. He developed the
new circuitry for a line that by 1941 included at least four models. The
speaker in the Professional Model was designed by James B. Lansing.
Early Rickenbacker amps influenced, among others, Leo Fender who by the
early 1940s repaired them at his radio shop in nearby Fullerton,
California.

How
did Rickenbacker guitars shape the 1930s music industry? Beauchamp had
many friends and contacts in the entertainment community and as a result
many stars used his instruments. Sol Hoopii and Dick McIntyre, to name
just two popular Hawaiian steel guitarists, played Rickenbackers on
countless influential recordings. Perry Botkin, who did many recording
sessions with Bing Crosby and other Hollywood stars, used one of the few
Vibrola Spanish Models. Les Paul owned a Rickenbacker. Electro String
even made Harpo Marx an electric harp. A family of Rickenbacker Electro
String Instruments was born, all using some variation of the
horseshoe-magnet pickup. Besides guitars and mandolins, the company
invented fully electric bass viols, violins, cellos and violas. An
electric piano prototype sat in the firm's front office for years. Most
of these instruments totally disregarded traditional styling.
Rickenbacker realized that a fully electric instrument did not have to
retain the appearance of its acoustical counterpart. This conceptual
jump-the first of several Rickenbacker revolutions-liberated the
thinking of designers to come.

By 1940, after fifteen years in the fast lane, Beauchamp became
frustrated and disenchanted with the instrument business, partly due to
his deteriorating health. His second passion, fishing and designing
fishing lures, captured his attention. He patented one that he sought to
manufacture; to raise the necessary capital he sold his shares in
Electro String to Harold Kinney, Rickenbacker's bookkeeper. Soon after
this, Beauchamp went deep sea fishing and had a fatal heart attack. His
funeral procession was over two miles long. A true pioneer of electric
instruments, he unfortunately did not live to see the electric guitar
reach its full potential.

Adolph Rickenbacker had maintained other interests throughout
Electro String's short history; he never had as much faith in the guitar
business as his partners. Nevertheless, he continued instrument making
until 1953 when he sold the company to F.C. Hall, a leading figure in
the post-WWII Southern California music business. That sale marked the
end of one era and the beginning of another, the dawn of modern
Rickenbacker guitars.